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Cat butts, Cthulhu and other reasons to love Ravelry

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Three of my new cat butt coasters. I'm making them for my friend Karen, partly because she's a cat person,and partly because she lives in San Antonio and has been bragging nonstop about her basketball team beating the Blazers.
(Mary Mooney/The Oregonian)

If you're not on Ravelry, you should be. Here's what you need to know:

The beginning: 2007. At the time there was a waiting period to join. Now it's instantaneous.

The people: About 4 million people from all over the world

The patterns: As of this writing, almost half a million, and more are added every day. Roughly a third of them are free.

The search engine: Absolutely extraordinary. Got 300 yards of sportweight and you're thinking you might want to make a woman's scarf, maybe lacy, but not too hard? You can punch in those parameters and get exactly what you need. Ravelry's pattern search engine is a marvel; it's worth joining just to have access to it.

Join me: I'm mcubed on Ravelry. (The name's a math geek way to represent my initials, MMM.) Let's be friends!

The coasters were funny. They were gross. They were realistic. So naturally, I went to Ravelry to find the pattern; naturally, I found not just one but two cat butt coaster patterns, and I realized, not for the first time, just how glorious Ravelry is, and why.

Ravelry exploded onto the fiber arts scene in 2007, and it’s probably done more to reshape the yarn crafting landscape than any invention since the spinning wheel. A lot of us call it “Facebook for knitters/crocheters,” but really, that doesn’t do it justice. Yes, Ravelry has 4 million members; yes, we have profiles, user names and “friends.” But Ravelry’s magic goes well beyond that, and even beyond the nearly half-million patterns, about a third of them free, it offers. Ravelry’s about validation.

The thing of it is, knitting and crocheting are inherently social activities. Even if you don’t belong to a crafting group. Even if you buy your yarn exclusively online. Even if you never speak to another living soul about yarn. Because when you pick up your needles or your hooks and start to create, you’re taking part in a tradition that’s been going on for hundreds of years, and you’re using skills that have been passed down for generations. Just as individual stitches form fabric, individual crafters form the crafting community, and, basically, the craft itself. Ravelry, more than anything I know of, makes that clear.

Poke around the site for even a few minutes and you realize that no matter how solitary you are, you’re part of a tribe. And Ravelry is home. Here, you will not just find other knitters and crocheters, you’ll find ones who think cat butts needs to be honored with handmade coasters – and they’ll show you how to do it right.

I personally find it very comforting to know that whatever bizarre idea I have, there’s someone on Ravelry who either shares that vision or can offer guidance on how to make it a reality. A few months ago my pal Kurt made an off-the-cuff remark about wanting a Cthulhu ski mask for winter running. It sounded like a most excellent holiday gift idea to me, so naturally, I turned to Ravelry hoping someone there had friends as warped as mine and could offer a pattern. And because Ravelers are my tribe, searching under “Cthulhu” brings up no less than 82 patterns, including multiple ski masks, one of which is now in my library, destined for Kurt.

And that’s just a small part of the awesomeness of Ravelry. Consider the Ravelry forums. As you'd expect, there are forums that deal specifically with crafting: techniques, patterns, individual designers, stores, yarns. But there’s much more. Name a topic – fiber related or not – and odds are you’ll find a Ravelry forum devoted to it. Science fiction fans. Recipe swappers. Runners. TV show fans. Book lovers. Advocates of a particular political position. Moms, people in recovery, cancer survivors, pet people. All bound together with the common threads of crafting and creativity. No matter what your (non-fiber) interests are or what you’re going through, you can find kindred spirits on Ravelry.

While some discussions on Ravelry get lively, it’s exceedingly rare to see the kind of savagery so sadly prevalent on so many other online forums. This is because the inherent decency of crafters dovetails with the guiding rule of the forums: DBAJ, namely, Don’t Be A Jerk. Bonds on Ravelry can grow so strong that members meet up at fiber events, wearing buttons with their Ravelry names and finally attaching faces to names. You know you’re in the presence of Ravelers when you overheard someone saying, “Hi! Are you BeagleMommy? I’m Dr.WhoFanatic!”

Even if you’re not a particularly social sort – and hey, I’m not – your fellow Ravelers can be there for you in other ways, by providing inspiration and information. A lot of people post photos of their finished work on Rav, and it can be a godsend. Besides offering reassurance that said pattern is doable, people write tips warning of potential pitfalls. It’s like hiking and getting periodic missives from those who’ve already broken the trail, and it can save you endless tears, or just comfort that you’re not the only one who finds the directions in Section 4, Row 16 incomprehensible.

The photos themselves can solve problems. I happen to stink at matching colors. The prospect of picking a mere two colors to make Rosaria, Michele Bernstein’s Rose City Yarn Crawl shawlette, intimidated the hell out of me, and I told her so.

“Go to Ravelry,” the designer advised me. Call up the pattern, click where it says “Projects,” and see what combinations other people have used, she urged. See what you like. See what works for you. It’s the best way to do it.

So I went, I saw, I swooned. And I found all kinds of color combinations that I never would've considered that look incredible. Equally important, I found what I don’t like, and what won’t work for me. Best of all, I found all this out before buying yarn, starting the pattern and discovering six hours into it that the colors that looked great in the skeins make my eyes bleed when knitted up into the pattern. You can’t put a price on that kind of intel.

Ravelry particularly resonates for those of us old enough to remember the dark days of knitting/crocheting, when the Web was barely a whisper, there weren’t a ton of yarn shops around and anyone under 40 entering said shops was regarded with suspicion. I distinctly remember living in New Jersey in the mid-’90s, being a 20-something rookie knitter, and driving 45 minutes to the nearest non-Michaels yarn store. Once I got there, I was treated with disdain by staffers who didn’t sell sock yarn, who rolled their eyes when I asked the price of an item and who refused to sell me a pattern because I wasn’t also buying the yarn to make it. Looking back, it’s a wonder I stuck with knitting at all – I left the shop convinced that I was the only 20-something knitter in the world, that all yarn shops were snooty and that it was normal for a shop to refuse to sell a pattern.

Ravelry’s helped change that kind of thing. By essentially forming a clearinghouse for fiber information, it’s guaranteed that no one knits or crochets alone anymore. Even if you’re not active on Rav’s boards or “friending” people, you can log on, tap the expertise of others, and find out in a hurry if a shop/pattern/yarn is worth your time. You can find friends, if you want them; you can get support if you need it. If individual crafters are stitches in the fabric of our community, Ravelry’s helped tighten our gauge; it’s brought us together, made us strong and durable, and managed to retain a wonderful softness.

“Facebook for knitters”? No. Facebook should be so lucky. There’s nothing quite like Ravelry. And I have a set of cat butt coasters to prove it.